The popular theory that Portuguese is little more than a kind of nasalized Spanish breaks down sharply in Brazil, where a good knowledge of Spanish will get you the right word about 30% of the time and the wrong pronunciation 100% of the time. If you know Spanish, reading Portuguese is easy, but even fluent Spanish offers no guarantee that you'll be able to make yourself understood verbally, especially with people who simply don't have a second language.

To make matters worse, I spent the first three days of my stay doing half-day stints as a translator for one of M's colleagues, a Malagasy speaker whose second language is French. I don't have either the fluency or the speed of thought necessary to do simultaneous translation, but her French was fairly basic so my role was to provide a kind of running précis - occasionally footnoted for context - of whatever was being said.

This was not always easy. I don't have M's extensive lexicon of French public health jargon, making it necessary to invent elaborate paraphrases to get the point across. The distracting mutter of the professional translators turning English into Portuguese and Spanish and back again didn't help and neither did the tendency of the rather excitable Latin American contingent to shout so loudly when making their points that they actually drowned out the translation channel.

But at least English-French translation was manageable. I did once make the mistake of letting myself get sucked into acting as an intermediary between my Francophone charge and a woman from Ecuador and the experience was painful for all concerned. I will not be attempting any more Spanish-French until my spoken Spanish gets a whole lot better.

The upshot of all this is that even now that the meeting is over, there are still days when I don't know which Romance language I'm supposed to be speaking. At some moments it seems as if I have invented an entire language, complete all the way down to the definite articles and present-tense verb endings, which is neither Spanish, French, Italian or Portuguese. I sometimes have the nasty suspicion that I may be arriving at Esperanto by the back door.

My private proto-Iberian isn't terribly effective for communicating, but there are times when that could be a good thing. A certain amount of confusion was caused on the first night when A-L took out her Portuguese phrase book — complete with a whole section of handy phrases for use in the bedroom, including “Don't worry about it, I can finish by myself” — and passed it around the supper table. N, a South African woman turned to her neighbor, a local woman from Cidade de Deus, and — in an unfortunately perfect accent — declared “I know you're just using me for sex”. The poor Brazilian was so startled by the accusation that she immediately began to apologize and it took a few minutes for her companions to persuade her that N was just practicing.